European countries have been circulating a watch list of missing Syrian and Iraqi passports they fear could be filled with false data and used by people to travel to Europe and beyond, diplomats said.

Such documents represent an additional security risk for European states grappling with a large influx of refugees from countries including Syria and Iraq because they are harder to identify than outright fakes.

One diplomat said the list contained serial numbers of thousands of genuine blank passports that were held in government offices in parts of Syria and Iraq which have since been captured by armed groups including Islamic State.

The diplomat said there were around 5,000 missing Syrian passports from Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces on the list and 10,000 Iraqi ones from areas of Anbar, Nineveh and Tikrit.

The rush for a nuclear deal with Iran has left human rights issues sidelined Photo: AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

The rush to a nuclear deal with Iran has left human rights issues sidelined. Few people in the West seem to care. They just want to ensure that Tehran does not develop a nuclear capability. This aim is understandable but it leaves Iran’s political prisoners, torture victims and persecuted ethnic minorities with little hope of any respite.

​Tehran denies abusing human rights and seeks to deflect criticism by pointing the finger at abuses by Western countries. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has accused the US of oppressing the black community. Other leaders have boasted that, unlike the West, Iran has no racial discrimination. I know different; having been a victim of the regime’s anti-Arab racism.

I belong to the Arab ethnic minority in Iran, known as Ahwazis. Our homeland, Al-Ahwaz, is now part of south-west Iran. Oil-rich and agriculturally-abundant, it was annexed by Tehran in 1925 and renamed Khuzestan.

In the years after the 2005 Ahwazi Arab uprising against the Iranian occupation of Al-Ahwaz, the Tehran regime made indiscriminate mass arrests of an estimated 25,000 Ahwazi human rights, cultural and political activists.

Photo: An Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighter takes position on the front line in Bashiqa, a town 13 kilometres north-east of Mosul on 12 August, 2014 (AFP).

Amid the bizarre international row with Turkey, there is a battle between Kurds, Sunnis and Shia Iraqis for the long-term future of Mosul.

The announcement on 3 December that Turkey had sent a detachment of 150 soldiers and seven tanks over 100km south of the border to the town of Bashiqa in Iraq added a new and confusing strand to the tangle of international disputes Turkey is currently involved in.

What was the intention behind sending such a force? Who in Iraq wanted it to come - and, given that there were instant Iraqi protests and claims that Turkey had violated international law, how would the detachment be able to stay there?

Bashiqa (also known as Ba’ashiqa) is a small town about 20km north east of Mosul, the oil-rich Iraqi provincial capital which has been held by Islamic State (IS) militants since June 2014. Its location makes it a suitable staging point for a future operation to drive IS out of Mosul and for that reason a military encampment has come into being there where Turkey seems to have been training soldiers at least since March this year but probably for longer.

Decades of war and sanctions have left Iraqi patients with a destroyed healthcare system.

On most days Yazan, a new graduate, manages the emergency department at one of Baghdad’s most crowded hospital wards in the sprawling Sadr City neighbourhood. However, Yazan has spent the past few weeks behind closed doors fearing for his life. After months of abuse and humiliation, it was a physical assault, accompanied with death threats by the family of a patient, that forced Yazan’s exit from his rotating internship in general medicine.​Nearly a month since the incident, Yazan is still awaiting news on whether he will be transferred to a different hospital where he can safely pursue his career in medicine. He didn’t appear worried as we exchanged words through a videophone call, but rather bemused rather by his own predicament: a junior doctor who could be hunted down, gunned and killed, simply for doing his job.

The problem of violence against doctors “Humiliated, beaten, insulted, and threatened — for what? — for things so trivial that they defy logic; demands for supplements, injections, or drugs that patients are not in need of,” Yazan exclaimed.

Patients, as he explained, seek to impress their authority on doctors, and if that fails, they flaunt their phones threatening to end their life with a single call to powerful militias. This reversal of roles has played out for several years now, sustained by an underworld of militia gangs and tribal networks that are armed and well connected and lamentably respected, in the absence of a functioning state.

The daughter of Anbar, the Baghdadian city that rests on the banks of the Euphrates, barricaded itself every morning and learned to survive the abrasive nature of war and bombings. The Americans believed that their repeated shelling would extinguish the city’s flame but they were wrong. The beginning of a major liberation movement swept Iraq and ended with the expulsion of its twenty-first century invaders. They left with their tails between their legs in disappointment, reminding them of the failures they experienced in Vietnam, and perhaps even more.

​Fallujah: what is unknown about this city is that it differs from the majority of other Iraqi cities and that it is located approximately 40 kilometres west of Baghdad. The mosques have found their place among the houses of the city and they are so great in number that Fallujah is now known as the “mother of mosques”, being home to more than 100 mosques; the perimeter of the city does not exceed 30 kilometres.

When the Americans invaded Baghdad in the spring of 2003 the shock was intense for all, whether it was the Iraqis who set eyes on a tank headed for their capital for the first time, or even the rest of the Arab and Islamic world as they saw the occupation of one of the region’s most influential capitals. While it is true that Iraqi resistance was quick to form in the face of the new invaders — many have called it the fasted growing resistance in history —it was still not enough to revive and protect the dignity of the Iraqi and Arab peoples when American tanks entered Baghdad on 9 April 2003.​The people of Fallujah protested against the occupation of Iraq for nearly a year in an effort to regain the balance of everyday life and the dignity of the city. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, the plan to divide the country was already on the invader’s table. Nothing was missing, not even the means to implement the project. Twenty-five million Iraqis were subsequently divided into Sunni, Shia, Kurds and other minorities. Even so, Fallujah stood as a reminder to all Iraqis that the path to resistance was ongoing and that national unity remained a goal. In the spring of 2004, Fallujah was the first Iraqi city to free itself from the US occupation after a battle that lasted 33 days. American forces used all of their energy to try to reclaim the city and failed.

They’re the West’s best hope. But Iraq’s Kurds have economic and political issues to deal with.

Last year’s sweeping offensive by Islamic State militants through northern Iraq thrust one community in particular to the fore – the Kurds.

​As Baghdad’s power withered under the assault, Kurdish leaders spoke about transforming their semi-autonomous status into full independence. And as Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes emerged as one of the most effective counters to the jihadists, they were lavished with Western praise and military aid.​Eighteen months later, the governor of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, admits that some peshmerga are fighting Islamic State without being paid on time.

Qassem Suleimani, an Islamic hardliner spoiling for a fight with the West

Followers of Suleimani

Christopher Booker examines the influence of the Quds Force in the battle against Isil and Assad; and a Jungian theory about Margaret Thatcher.

In all the coverage given to unravelling who is for or against whom in the unspeakable shambles of Syria, one key bit of the jigsaw too often gets forgotten. We know Russia is pro-Assad but anti-Isil and other assorted Syrian rebels. Turkey is anti-Assad and Isil, but also Russia and the Kurds. The Kurds are anti-Assad, Isil and Turkey. The US-led coalition is anti-Isil but pro the Kurds, Turkey and the other Syrian rebels.

The other crucial player too easily overlooked, however, is that major power in the region without whose military support Assad would long ago have vanished: the dictatorship run by the Shia mullahs in Tehran. Ever since his country fell apart, Assad’s main support has been the Quds Force, the extra-territorial arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

​For years it has been fomenting terror across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Afghanistan and not least in Iraq, where its backing for Shia militias posed the most deadly threat to US and British forces throughout their post-2003 occupation.

French mural of former Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki. [ThierryEhrmann/Flickr]

Nouri al-Maliki's Western-backed rule in Iraq was a disaster that lead to the growth of Isis, argues Struan Stevenson.

Struan Stevenson was a Conservative MEP representing Scotland in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014. He was President of the Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq from 2009 to 2014. He is now President of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA)

When Haider al-Abadi was installed as Prime Minister of Iraq last year, it was the culmination of a long-delayed process, whereby the international community realised the harm that had been done to the country and the region by his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki.

When the West put its trust in Abadi and his programme of reform, it was the beginning of a necessary reversal of policy toward Iraq. But it was not alone sufficient to make up for the mistakes of the past, especially the decision by the European Union and the United States to accede to Iran’s demands by supporting Maliki’s re-election in 2010.

1 December 2015 – Nearly 500 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq last month in a “vicious circle of violence,” ranging from acts of terrorism to armed conflict, as the total number of Iraqi casualties rose to more than 2,100, according to the UN Assistance Mission in the crisis-gripped country.

In the month of November, the mission, known as UNAMI, reported the number of civilians killed was 489 and the number of civilians injured was 869, with a further 399 members of the Iraqi Security Forces killed and 368 injured.

Baghdad was again the worst affected Governorate with 1,110 civilian casualties (325 killed, 785 injured), Ninewa had 109 killed and 41 injured, while Kirkuk 14 killed and 23 injured, Salahadin 21 killed and 08 injured, and Diyala 16 killed and 11 injured.UNAMI said it has been hindered in effectively verifying casualties in conflict areas.

For instance, the mission said, it could not obtain the casualty figures for the month of November from Anbar, where fighting for control of the province is raging and lack of access has left tens of thousands of people without humanitarian assistance for more than seven months